We have also reviewed business planning and the importance of developing a written business plan for continued success. Without a plan, your business is not likely to succeed. The Internet can be a tremendous benefit to you as you develop a plan. You can learn about your industry, your markets, and your competition. The Internet also plays an important role in many potential business strategies. Whether you ultimately develop a written plan or not, you will need to follow the planning process and decide on some direction for your business.

Additionally, we have reviewed the role of e-commerce, developing and maintaining your website, and marketing your site. “If you build it, they will come,” is only true in movies about building a stadium for ghosts to play baseball in Iowa. You must market your website as you would any of your other products. If you don't get people to the site they can't use it to buy from you. Websites can be relatively inexpensive to develop and launch. Give careful thought to differentiating yourself by providing appropriate information and sales capabilities on your site. While we've not focused on the technicalities associated with how to do many of these things, we have tried to provide some idea of where you need to begin if you'd like to add an Internet technology into your farm business management toolkit.

There are some items this course has not covered in detail. One, financial management, deserves a bit of attention. The Internet makes it possible to manage your bank, investment, and retirement accounts on-line. As long as your bank, credit union, retirement company, or other financial services company provides the service, you can check balances and move money among accounts. You can even make purchases of investments or pay your bills straight from your bank account. Check with each of your financial services companies, including your bank, about these features. Electronic tax filing is now very common among individuals. For some businesses, law now requires electronic filing. Check with your accountant for details about these issues.

As you look forward to managing in the future, you may have decided that you really need to learn more about some of the technologies and how you might be able to effectively apply them. If so, that's wonderful. We advocate all of these technologies, although not for the sake of advocating technology. Rather, we truly believe that you can manage more effectively by using one or more of these tools. Our guest farm business owners concur.

We hope that this text has encouraged you to begin to explore new technologies. More importantly, we hope that you have developed some ideas about how to incorporate them into your business management toolkit. Most importantly, however, we hope that your business will be more profitable and sustainable as you integrate Internet technologies into your business plan.